Definitely understood and a valid hesitation. What do you think about just using slave servers to query the verification meta tags to add to the front page? It may seem pretty insignificant, but I'm trying to reduce overall master database load on the front page for logged in users (where a lot of activity is occurring and Varnish, of course, is not an option). Many thanks for your time.

This seems to me to definitely be something that should be handled at the core level -- the connection object has the ability to have default options for all queries: https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/includes!database!database.inc/functio.... I imagine those can be set somehow. If not, then that's a core bug. It shouldn't be necessary to patch all contrib modules in this way!